I had wanted to throw a party for Matt but he was against celebrating him turning 30. Not so much he doesn't want to turn 30... but rather he thinks it's not that big of a deal and definitely doesn't want to draw attention to himself. (oh, how differently we feel about birthdays!) So following his wishes I didn't plan anything. Looking back now, I'm so glad we didn't -- Matt's birthday weekend ended up being a bit of a mess. First neither of us were feeling well -- Matt was sick last week and then I was sick over the weekend. It was a headache / sinus pressure / congestion type of sick and we pretty much both just felt miserable.
But the other reason why it was a mess is because my birthday present was finally set to be installed on Matt's birthday. That's right - the year long hunt for new floors is finally over! I had been slowly working on clearing out the office to make way for the nursery, but last weekend (9th-10th) we really focused on emptying it out. Then during the week and throughout the weekend, we cleared EVERYTHING out of the main floor and moved it to the lower level or garage. Saturday night we had almost everything moved and went out to Flying Mango to celebrate Matt's bday with his parents, my parents and the siblings. (Just thinking about Flying Mango now makes my mouth water - so good!)
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| Happy 30th Birthday Matt! |
On Sunday my parents came over and helped. Matt and my dad ripped up all the carpet (family room, hallway, 2 bedrooms) and pulled up 2 layers of linoleum in the kitchen. Apparently best practice says that you should pull up linoleum before placing down a new layer, but the last homeowners bucked the trend. So unfortunately for the boys they had an extra layer to scrap off, but fortunately for me, it was fun to see what the original floors looked like!
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| Original floors |
I tried to capture a few pictures of all the craziness that was going on, but the pictures don't really seem to caputre how chaotic or messy it really felt. Maybe being 7 months pregnant just made it feel more chaotic and messy in the moment.
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| Garage -- plywood to go under the new floors, the pile of old carpet, temporary storage for our furniture |
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| our "master" bedroom |
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| empty nursery |
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| A glimpse at the chaos in the basement |
Oh - I forgot to mention... we decided to paint all the doors and door frames white. Matt took all the doors off their frames and applied 2 coats of primer to them and to the door frames. Then when my dad was there on Sunday he helped apply the glossy white top coat. In case you're curious, in the hallway we have 2 closet doors, a bathroom door and 2 bedroom doors and then there is an accordian door in each bedroom --- so 7 doors in total.
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| Dad applying the glossy white coat |
Despite the craziness, we were able to get everything done prior to Matt's 30th birthday when the installation guys showed up! Matt spent his birthday supervising the crew, putting his feet up and keeping Gable calm. We found out from the install crew that the bedrooms aren't level and would either require a contractor to come in and level them before they could put in the pergo floors, or we could put in carpet instead. So when I got home from work, we went out to dinner in Ames at Old Main Brewery and then picked out new carpet. It's amazing to me what a deadline can do - It took us a LOOOONG time to pick laminate flooring that we liked, but because we HAD to make a decision right away about the carpet, we were able to pick one in an hour. haha!
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| Here's what we selected -- Very curious as to how it will look when we see more than 3 inches |
It's still feels chaotic in the house since the bedrooms are awaiting carpet and we're sleeping in the basement. It's also super dusty because the bedrooms just have floor boards and every morning I track dirt/dust from that room (need to get to the closet) into the hallway which spreads throughout. Plus they made some of the flooring cuts in the house so there's pergo sawdust still lingering. Matt still needs to install the base boards but without futher ado... here are the new floors!!!
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